Monday, April 25, 2011

The fluff hurts man, it hurts!

o/

So, I got together with two of my friends for a 2k, 2-v-1 game this past weekend. Us '2' used the split force org setup that is commonly used in team, tournaments. Seeing it as a good opportunity to try out the Auroras, I assembled the army at left. Not having any tanks of their own, the Auroras raided the Imperial motor pool borrowing a Pred. from the Dark Hands, as well as pulling the old Silver Skulls Pred. out of mothballs (for those that don't know, the Skulls Pred. is the FIRST 40k model I ever bought so many years ago). I also included a 5-man filler tac. squad as I still don't have enough scouts to muster a 1k list. Backing up the Aurora 10th was a 'Logan-wing' Death Star list which both dealt & suffered the vast majority of the casualties inflicted (indeed, not one scout was lost during the game).

The scouts performed decently for a first run. They did a fair amount of damage to what came their way, however with Logan & friends drop podding into the Nid backfield, they weren't too high on the bug priority list. The 10-man scout squad didn't feel the need to outflank till about turn 5 (I should have combat squaded them to help mitigate that problem) and though they did move onto & cover an objective, they never fired a shot the whole game. The snipers (true to form) missed more often than not, so much so that the Sgt. with sniper rifle consistently rolled 2's to hit. They did inflict several casualties though, with the hero of the squad being the ML scout who popped the Doom of Malan'tai with a krak missile (though not in time to save four marines out of the command squad).

Then there was the Predators. As described here, I've planned on fielding Scout crewed BS:3 predators in my Aurora army. Sounds great on paper, but its kinda painful in prcatice. Both tanks had several rolls of '3' to hit that had to be picked up, not to bad to handle EXCEPT for the Silver Skulls' Pred. which rolled straight 3's to hit with ALL weapons for TWO consecutive rounds.

...sigh...

I got a few looks, where I'm sure the other guys were waiting for me to say 'fuck it' & take the 3's as hits. Aaaaand I seriously considered it, til I figured that if I compromised on that principle now, I'd never hold to it in the future. So I picked up the 3's & moved on to the next unit. Success was thus sacrificed on the bloody alter of fluff.I made a stop by the FLGS Saturday for more paint & primer. I was going to wait till next week, but I was an idiot and Friday night when putting the paints up for the evening, I forgot to close my Chaos black paint pot which was already down to it's last dregs. Those dregs were dried up completely when I found the open pot Saturday morning. Ugh. Ya can't do a whole lot of painting without black. While @ the shop I got a can of primer, and so despite their mediocre performance on the tabletop, the last 2 scout snipers in my squad are now finished. I may flesh these guys out to a full 10 man unit & then split it into two 5-man sniper squads with Telion leading one of them.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Well *I* was inspired! So much so that I started priming the next drop pod... and interesting thing about paint. I never noticed it until I started working on models yesterday, but GW has darkened Shadow Grey! I thought my drop pod was looking really dark compared to my other vehicles... Any way, that was a fun game! Logan's 'Wolf-Guard Wing' proved to be surprisingly durable and fun. Still,despite the body count they racked up, they failed to hold an objective and died gloriously at the tender attentions of the Swarm Lord (he really is cuddly, no?) -JP

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